Suiting Themselves

Here’s word from Deenah Vollmer, our woman at Sundance, who brings some backstory to one festival event.

I had some unfinished business with Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss video artist who had an installation deep in Park City’s underground, an official Sundance venue called New Frontier on Main located in the basement of a mall on Main Street.

Over a year ago, at MOMA’s opening party for her video installation “Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters),” I approached the exuberant and petite artist to say congratulations. She welcomed me with warmth and a flurry of staccato kisses even though I was a stranger.

I gave her my contact information and she promised to send me her outfit. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it—I’m about a head taller than she is—but I figured I could hang it on my wall. A full year passed.

On Friday night, at the opening party of New Frontier’s space, I received word that Pipilotti, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, was circulating.

Her fourteen-minute video installation “Lobe of Lung (The Saliva Ooze Away to the Underground)” is projected on a screen that spans and covers two adjoining walls of a short-ceilinged, carpeted, and cushioned room. Super-saturated images of glistening nipples, resting pigs, puckering tulips, and feet and hands that somehow look more like vaginas, kaleidoscopically pass through the frame in macro focus.

“This is the room to get stoned in,” a friend said to me at the party.

“This is where I am going to take a nap,” I said.

Pipilotti, jump-suited in orange, entered her glowing room, and I honed in.

“Do you remember me?” I asked.

“Let me look at your face.”

I turned my head.

“Let me hear your voice.”

I spoke. “The MOMA opening party,” I said.

“Yes! The suit!” she said. She had five hundred things on her to-do list and it sometimes took her four years, but she would, she assured me, send the suit.

“Holy, holy, holy,” she said in a dramatic Swiss accent. She had just seen “Howl” and loved the part of the poem where Ginsberg declares everything holy. I understand why and look forward to her début feature, “Pepperminta,” starring two humans, a pig, and an earthworm, which premièred at Sundance on Friday.

Life itself as an ongoing art project… This scene should find its way into somebody’s screenplay.

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